A Few Snippets More

We love us some snippets. Here are a few handy little snippet ideas to make your life just a little easier.

The following snippets work best when they can expand next to any character. Click on whichever group you place them in, and the Group Settings will appear to the right. Choose “Any Character precedes abbreviation” from the “Expand when:” popup menu.

Plain Text

Ever copy text and paste it into some sort of WYSIWYG editor, then post, or email, only to find out later all the font is different? The next time you paste some text, expand this snippet instead. It converts anything copied to the clipboard to plain text before it expands.

Abbreviation: ppt

Content: %clipboard

Label: Paste in plain text

Set the “Abbreviation:” menu to “Ignore case”

Set the “Content:” menu to “Plain Text”

The abbreviation can be whatever you want, that’s just a suggestion.

Capital “I”

While TextExpander settings can capitalize the start of a sentence (Preferences > Options), the lone letter “i” can appear anywhere in a sentence and it also needs capitalizing. This snippet uses spaces as part of the abbreviation so the flow of your typing doesn't need to change at all. The { } curly brackets are not meant to be in the snippet, they indicate instructions on what to type. Be sure your snippet group settings “Expand after:” popup menu is set to “Any Character”.

Abbreviation: {space}{lower case “i”}{space}

Content: {space}{upper case “I”}{space}

Label: Capitalize “I”

Set the “Abbreviation:” menu to “Ignore case”

Set the “Content:” menu to “Plain Text”

Space Between Sentences

For the writers, if you can’t re-train yourself to use Period-Space between sentences instead of Period-Space-Space, here’s a snippet to convert it for you.

Abbreviation: {period}{space}{space}

Content: {period}{space}

Label: Period Space

Set the “Abbreviation:” menu to “Ignore case”

Set the “Content:” menu to “Plain Text”

Open URL in Chrome

Usually for Flash, but you may have other reasons to want to view your currently open Safari tab in the Chrome browser. Since this is an AppleScript snippet it does not require you to be in a text field when you type it.

Abbreviation: cchrome

Content:

property theURL : ""
tell application "Safari"
set theURL to URL of current tab of window 1
end tell
if appIsRunning("Google Chrome") then
tell application "Google Chrome"
make new window
set URL of active tab of window 0 to theURL
activate
end tell
else
tell application "Google Chrome"
do shell script "open -a \"Google Chrome\""
set URL of active tab of window 0 to theURL
activate
end tell
end if
on appIsRunning(appName)
tell application "System Events" to (name of processes) contains appName
end appIsRunning